THE TAMING OF COCAINE

Drug epidemiology in Belgium is scarcely out of its infancy. Classical findings are biased and reveal only a partial picture of drug use patterns because they focus on the best known, most visible and maybe most marginalised subgroups of users. What is most striking about drug use in Belgium is the complete lack of qualitative data. The Taming of Cocaine is based on longitudinal ethnographic fieldwork in the Antwerp club scene and repeated in-depth interviews with 111 experienced cocaine users. The overall theme of the book is the genesis and the development of informal control mechanisms (social sanctions and rituals) among these illegal drug users. The Belgian data are compared consistently to the findings of other comparable community studies in European and American cities - Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Barcelona, Turin, San Francisco, Toronto - and in Scotland and Australia .